


Love Me Till The Day I Die

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Series: Prompt Fills [48]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-16 06:21:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21503302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: Adventures with the Doctor are likely to turn sour, and this excursion is no different. Villains? Check. Unrest? Check. Big guns? Check.Mortal injury? Check.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair, Thirteenth Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald
Series: Prompt Fills [48]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/585397
Comments: 7
Kudos: 68





	Love Me Till The Day I Die

**Author's Note:**

> From allnewtpir's prompt:
> 
> _I don't believe there are any fics about Clara's quasi-immortality. Thusly, I want a scenario where Clara is damaged in such a way that would normally be fatal, in which she fully realises her condition and 13/Team TARDIS comfort her accordingly._

They’re running.

This really shouldn’t be surprising, because life with the Doctor is, at Clara’s reckoning, at least eighty-five percent running, ten percent mortal peril, and five percent snogging; or it is in her experiences anyway, which are not easily generalisable (at least she hopes they’re not; she really doesn’t want to think about the Doctor and Graham snogging). Sometimes there’s mortal peril _and_ there’s running, or sometimes just one or the other, but in this instance there’s both, and she’s somewhat preoccupied by wondering whether, you know, balance of probability and all, that means there’s a snog at the end of this all.

“Where are we going?” calls Yaz from somewhere behind her, and she snaps her attention back to the present, skidding around a corner and nearly barrelling into the wall of a nearby ruined building. “I mean, other than-”

“Back to the TARDIS,” the Doctor yells, pausing for long enough to look around them in search of cover. This world has been ravaged by war since long before they dropped in (which makes a nice change to starting wars, Clara reasons) and all that remains of the town they’ve landed in are piles of rubble and decrepit buildings, often consisting of little more than two or three walls and exposed roof struts. There’s the odd dead tree poking out of the scorched earth, or a burnt out vehicle, but the Doctor has vetoed using those for cover with the sensible words ‘fuel tanks’, and so they’re mainly focused on running away from the bad guys, although who the bad guys really _are_ is anyone’s guess.

This was a human outpost once – that much is evident from the vaguely-Earth-like feel to the entire place. Something – the Doctor had explained, and Clara hadn’t listened – went sour a decade prior, and they’d managed to find themselves in the midst of a fresh battle, as the two sides fought for control of what was, on the surface, not an area of particularly strategic importance. However, as the Doctor had lain down on the cold concrete of the road and pressed her stethoscope to an area with minimal cracks, she’d assured them that below them ran many miles of tunnels and stockpiles of weapons, and so the battle above ground was really more about what was below them, which was what… well, whoever the blokes with guns were, wanted.

Whatever the blokes with guns _also_ seem to want is to kill them, Clara reflects. It’s a sad fact that if you stride into most warzones and try to sit both sides down and sign an armistice, neither side really wants to play ball. In fact, quite often, they _do_ want to play ball, if the ball in question happens to be your severed head, which she supposes really does say a lot about not just her race, but alien races too (she’s not alienist, thank you very much; there seems to be equal-ops murder and destruction in all the wars she’s encountered, regardless of species), and their general proclivity for blowing each other up. Maybe by now the Doctor should have learned to stop playing the peace maker, even if sometimes it _is_ successful; for each effort in which she manages to stop a war, they also get shot at – sometimes even both, which might be why the Doctor continues to strive for universal peace. It’s fairly admirable, really.

It is, however, also bloody annoying.

Not to mention the fact that when it’s just the two of them, there’s less to shoot at; when they’ve got the whole team tagging along, there’s three additional targets to worry about; three additional people to keep safe; three additional people to try and marshal and corral into staying alive. She loves the team – don’t get her wrong, they’re great people to hang out with – but it’s enough trying to worry about keeping the Doctor, intergalactic puppy-dog that she is, from getting her head chopped off, let alone three humans who are lacking in awareness of some of the social niceties of the rest of the solar system, let alone the wider galaxy. Just last week, Graham had put his foot in it with some dignitaries from Klom, and Clara had just about recovered from the embarrassment of that particular incident when they’d rocked up here and nearly had their heads taken off by snipers.

“Next,” she calls to the Doctor pleadingly. “Can we go somewhere sunny? Warm? Not at war?”

“This is sunny,” the Doctor points out, gesticulating vaguely to the twin yellow orbs in the sky above them. “And warm. What more do you want?”

“Not getting shot at,” Ryan grouses, his arms pumping as he runs. “Ideally. I’m not a fan.”

“I’m with him on that,” Graham pants, keeping pace with his grandson in a fairly admirable way, all things considered. “I’m not into all this running.”

“I don’t mind it,” Yaz chips in, and when Clara chances glancing at her, she’s unsurprised to find the police officer entirely unruffled by the chase. “But it’s not doing my nerves much good, all this getting shot at.”

“Can’t take them anywhere,” the Doctor says with a grin, turning and tipping a lightning-fast wink at Clara. “Can we? All they do is-”

“Hello, little children,” a harsh, cruel voice cuts over the top of their banter, and a posse of armed soldiers step out from a concealed hiding place in front of them. “What are youse doing on our planet?”

“Oh,” the Doctor breaks into an entirely inappropriate smile. “You’re Scottish! Space Scots!”

“Shut the hell up, wee girl,” the leader snarls, raising his weapon and cocking it menacingly. His face is pitted and scarred with old injuries, and he’s wearing so much body armour that Clara wonders how he can stand. “Youse need to get the hell of our planet.”

“We’re trying to,” the Doctor explains, holding her hands up in the universal gesture for surrender. “We’re just trying to get back to our ship.”

“What ship?” the leader looks around them with over-exaggerated emphasis, swinging his head and his weapon around as he did so. “I don’t see no ship.”

“It doesn’t look-”

“Spies,” he says suddenly, his face contorting into a nasty sneer. “Youse are all spies, aren’t ye?”

“No!” the Doctor shakes her head vehemently, looking somewhat aghast by this turn of events. “No, we’re not, we’re really-” she casts a desperate look at Clara, and somehow that’s all the leader needs.

“Oh,” he says cruelly, and Clara feels her heart sink. “Oh, I see how it is. Seize the pretty wee girl.”

“No!” the Doctor shouts, as one of them lunges forwards and seizes Clara by the hair, dragging her away from the group and over to the midst of their squadron. Clara knows that if her heart were still beating, it would be racing now; up close to their men and their armour and their weapons, she feels adrenaline spike through her, although she does her best to appear defiant in the face of their leers and their taunts. “If you lay so much as a hand on her,” the Doctor says in a low, dangerous voice, her hands balling into fists at her sides. Clara knows this voice; she’s heard it before, and she knows what it leads to. “I will kill you.”

“Will youse now?” the leader raises his eyebrows condescendingly. “That I’d like to see. Will it incite you to confess?”

“Confess _what_?”

The leader whips out his gun before any of them can react, and fires at Clara with a casual, nonchalant air.

She hasn’t had time to steel herself for the pain, and it’s indescribable. She’s dimly aware of the Doctor and the team screaming; dimly aware of the soldier holding onto her letting her crumple to the ground; dimly aware that she, too, is screaming, but what overrides everything else is the pain. She manages to raise her head enough to see the gaping, charred hole blasted through her side; the exposed, jagged shards of white that were once her ribs, and a cavernous, ominous tear in what she recognises with faint detachment as her lung, before she realises that she’s struggling for breath. Something hot is running down her chin and onto her neck, and consciousness begins to slip away from her as the perpetrator starts to laugh.

She’s alone. Why is she alone? Why is no one coming to her aid; why is no one coming to hold her? She knows that this is it; knows that there is no way she can survive this, space treatment or no space treatment, and she yearns for nothing more than to die peacefully in the Doctor’s arms. If she can have nothing else, she reasons that dying right, as she’d intended to do all those years before, is all she wants now. Focusing her eyes with difficulty on the shooter, she realises his weapon is levelled at the Doctor’s head as the Time Lady screams at him and flashes something small and white at him, words and gestures that Clara can’t make out, and then suddenly his weapon lowers suddenly, and he moves away, his soldiers doing the same.

“Clara?” the Doctor is _there_ , suddenly; right there, and she’s cradling Clara as though she’s made of glass. “Clara? Stay with me; please, come on, stay with me. You’re going to be alright. You’re going to be fine.”

“Doc…” Graham says quietly, but the Time Lady pays him no heed.

“You’re going to be fine,” she says again. “Hey? Talk to me. Come on. Stay with me. I love you; I _love you_ , please, come on… stay with me.”

Clara opens her mouth uselessly, trying to form the words she desperately wants to say one final time, but no sound comes out. She coughs, flecks of blood spattering across the Time Lady’s face, and then…

Everything goes dark.

* * *

Things hurt.

Parts of her she didn’t know _could_ hurt _do_ hurt. Her left side aches in a way she hasn’t felt since she last ventured into a gym, and there’s a pain in her chest that makes her screw up her face in discomfort.

Her…

Hang on, she shouldn’t have a face, should she? She’s dead, surely – dead people don’t have faces; they just sort of… float around incorporeally, if she recalls the general theme of most literature on the subject. Dead people shouldn’t experience pain, either, so if this is the afterlife and she’s going to be in pain forever, she would very much like a refund.

She opens her eyes tentatively, and on first glance, this certainly _seems_ like the afterlife; the bright whiteness of the room makes her snap her eyes shut again instinctively, and when she chances another attempt, she opens them in fractions; a millimetre or two at a time. Slowly, the world around her comes into focus: there’s round things on the wall, pulsing slowly and gently, and she’s laying on a bed in what she now realises is the medical bay on the TARDIS.

Experimentally, she moves her hands to either side of her and struggles into a vague sitting position, looking down at her chest with trepidation. There’s a large, singed hole through her clothing, but the skin below it is unblemished; she places a finger on it nervously, and finds it soft and pleasantly warm. Probing across where she was sure there was a jagged, gaping wound, she runs her fingers over the reassuringly intact arches of her ribs, and takes a deep breath, watching the skin rise as her lungs inflate.

“Huh,” she says aloud with quiet surprise. “Not dead.”

Swinging her legs off the bed, she gets to her feet experimentally, feeling a twinge of pain in her chest as she sways on the spot, but managing to ignore it in favour of shuffling to the door. It’s uncomfortable and slightly painful to breathe, but she manages, and she places one hand on the wall as she takes slow, unsteady steps towards the console room, wondering where exactly everyone else is.

As she approaches, the amber glow of the central columns mirrored along the final stretch of corridor between the TARDIS’s living quarters and the console room, she suddenly understands.

The sound of grief echoes along the hallway towards her, acute and painful. There’s a high, agonised keening, interspersed with sobbing, and then a backdrop of quiet, murmured words, and it takes a moment before she realises that the wailing noise is the Doctor. The sudden understanding cuts her like a knife, and she feels her heart break as she edges closer, the sadness that fills the room almost tangible as it rushes into the corridor and embraces her.

“I’ve… I’ve already buried her once,” the Doctor sobs. “And now I have to… I can’t, Graham, I can’t… I’ve let her down, I’ve…”

There were soft murmurings that Clara couldn’t make out.

“I was supposed to look after her, and now she’s d-dead all over again and I… I can’t go on; I won’t go on.”

“Well, you have to,” Clara manages, stepping over the threshold, and every pair of eyes in the room snaps to her. The Doctor is sat on the floor beside the console with the team around her, her face and eyes wet with tears, and she gets unsteadily to her feet, holding onto Ryan’s arm unsteadily as her face contorts into a mask of fury.

“This isn’t funny!” she roars, turning and smashing her fist into the console before anyone can react, bringing her hand down again and again on a bank of switches as she screams: “This isn’t… how could you…”

Ryan seizes hold of her by the arms, pulling her away from the ship’s hub and offering quiet, reassuring words that Clara can’t make out, but she takes another step forwards nonetheless, reaching for the Time Lady with one hand.

“Doctor, it’s not… I’m real.”

“You’re _dead_ ,” the Doctor screams, shaking her head violently and battling with Ryan to be released. He wraps his arms around her shoulders and plants his feet, and Clara feels a rush of affection for him; he must be experiencing the same grief and confusion that the Time Lady is, and yet his priority is keeping her safe from herself. “You _died_.”

Clara crosses the space between them with a sudden surge of strength, reaching for the Doctor and feeling a sting of rejection as the Time Lady thrashes about, trying to avoid making physical contact with her.

“I’m not a hologram,” Clara says quietly, eventually settling her hands on the Doctor’s cheeks with some considerable effort, and watching the Time Lady still almost at once. “I’m really here. I’m really alive.”

There’s a pause as their eyes meet, and the Doctor seems to see something in Clara’s gaze that reassures her.

“Clara?” the Doctor chokes, her eyes filling with tears. “Clara? How?”

“I don’t know,” Clara admits. “I really don’t.”

Ryan lets go of the Doctor with a degree of reluctance, but the Time Lady simply remains frozen for several seconds, before reaching for Clara’s stomach with a shaking hand.

“You were…” she shakes her head hard. “After they shot you, I just…”

“She started yelling at them,” Yaz says in a tremulous voice, and Clara can see how visibly unsettled she is by the situation. “And flashed the psychic paper, and they ran off. We brought you back here, and like… I’m not being rude or anything, but you were dead.”

“I know,” Clara shrugs. “I didn’t know… I had no idea that what the Time Lords did was this powerful.”

“They must really want you alive,” Graham says, with forced cheerfulness, but his eyes are wet with tears, and he gives Clara an encouraging little smile.

“This one in particular,” the Doctor murmurs, pulling Clara into her embrace and clinging to her as though she’ll never let go. “Don’t you ever do that again.”

“I’ll try.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

The Doctor lets out a tremulous breath. “I thought I’d never hear you say that again.”

“I thought I’d never say it again,” Clara flashes a quick smile. “But… Impossible Girl, remember?”


End file.
